Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...
We should not be frightened by appearances.
When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer ’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.